Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include additional quotes from Lisa Daugaard, the director of Purpose Dignity Action, which runs the city’s largest diversion program, LEAD.

By Andrew Engelson

In the six months since Seattle enacted a controversial law making public drug use and possession a gross misdemeanor, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office has filed charges against 17 people for violations of the law, which criminalizes the use or possession of drugs other than cannabis. That’s a tiny percentage of about 300 arrests police have made since the new law went into effect in October.

And while advocates for diversion—a strategythat involves enrolling people in services  in lieu of charges—say the low charging rate is a good thing, the city’s main diversion program is perpetually underfunded and has had to shift strategies to take on so many new clients from arrests.

SPD has been arresting hundreds of people under the new law, though the number of monthly arrests has recently been on a steady decline.According to Seattle Police Department data, arrests spiked during a highly-publicized series of stings in October and peaked in January. The number of monthly misdemeanor drug arrests has dropped significantly since then, with just 20 arrests in March and six in the first 11 days of April. 

City Council President Sara Nelson and City Attorney Ann Davison touted the new law as a way to reduce public use of fentanyl and meth. But so far, it doesn’t seem to have made more than superficial changes to the level of drug use in two of the most visible hot spots in the city: Third Avenue downtown, and 12th and Jackson in the International District. According to SPD data, about two-thirds of arrests under the law were in SPD beats that encompass those two areas of the city.

Of the 17 people the city attorney’s office has charged, about half failed to appear for court hearings–a strong indicator that they were living without shelter. People who are homeless or struggle with mental illness often have trouble making court appearances, and this can result in a reinforcing cycle of interaction with the criminal justice system and lack of shelter. 

Davison’s office has motioned to remove municipal judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing eight of the 17 drug cases. Since March, Davison has directed city attorneys to challenge judge Vaddadi from hearing any criminal cases, charging that the judge, a former public defender, has a “regular pattern of biased rulings.”

Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid told PubliCola he’s seen about a dozen cases in his court related to the new drug law. “Anecdotally, from my own courtroom, I can tell you that I have a zero percent appearance rate so far for people charged under the new drug statute,” he said. 

According to municipal court records, the average time between an arrest under the new drug law and when the city attorney files charges is about 70 days; more than half of the people charged under the new law waited 90 days or more for Davison’s office to file charges. This is in sharp contrast to Davison’s promise, in 2022, to decide whether to file charges in all criminal cases within five business days after her office receives a referral from the police department.

“If charges aren’t filed right away, then it is very difficult to find a homeless person and get them to come to court,” Shadid said. “My suspicion is that the vast majority of people charged with [possession or public use] are homeless and that’s why we’re seeing such a low appearance rate in court.”

In about half the arrests under the new drug law, police referred drug users to the LEAD diversion program, which connects people with case management, harm reduction, and other services. 

Lisa Daugaard, the director of Purpose Dignity Action, which runs LEAD, says she welcomes the emphasis on diversion. “It’s completely appropriate for the city attorney to defer filing while LEAD case managers are working with people to complete diversion intake, and that’s what the ordinance calls for,” Daugaard said. “No one should criticize prosecutors for actively encouraging pre-filing diversion efforts, when those are demonstrated to be the most effective response to severe substance use disorder.”

However, taking on post-arrest referrals has required LEAD to stop taking referrals from other sources—effectively shifting its referral strategy away from community-based referrals, which don’t require an arrest, to post-arrest referrals for people caught violating the new law. Although LEAD has received more funding from state and federal sources in the meantime, that funding is not related to the new law and the city itself did not increase LEAD funding as part of its shift to arrest-based diversion. Over the past several years, LEAD (which used to stand for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) has moved toward community referrals, which don’t require people to choose diversion while in handcuffs.

The increase in SPD interactions put a strain on LEAD’s limited resources. To address this, during the recent legislative session, the supplemental budget included a $2.5 million boost to Seattle and King county’s LEAD program, in budget line items sponsored by Rep. Darya Farivar and Sen. Rebecca Saldaña. Combined with another $3.5 million in one-time funds, that’s enough to enable LEAD to do some community referrals, in addition to referrals resulting from arrests, this year. However, Daugaard said, the PDA is “reluctant to overextend on community referrals until there is a more sustainable plan for scaling beyond this year.”

“We are one of numerous community-based case management providers,” Daugaard said. “So it’s a collective response but it needs to have a stable, sustained funding stream. It’s an approach that almost everyone knows is the right approach. But you can’t go year to year, constantly on the verge of cutting it off.”

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Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, said the time it takes to review a case and file charges “is dependent on many factors, one of which is waiting for toxicology lab results.” The State Patrol’s toxicology lab has been plagued with delays (usually associated with DUI cases) but opened a new center last year to address the backlog.

Robinson said the city attorney’s office has a backlog of about 800 cases for all criminal cases awaiting a decision to file, including drug use, theft, DUI, domestic violence, and other misdemeanors. He said the city attorney’s office is currently reviewing whether to charge in 81 cases and 14 cases are awaiting toxicology reports. 

In the 17 cases the city attorney has charged, arrest reports show that they almost universally involve suspected fentanyl or meth use, and include descriptions such as one in an officer’s report that mentions “lighters, foil, and pipes, tubular objects that they were holding near the foil.”

Currently, no one arrested under the drug law is being booked into jail. King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention still has in place a pandemic-era moratorium on booking most people accused of non-violent misdemeanors. Robinson said that while those arrested aren’t able to be booked, “They may be booked into jail if they have also committed a companion crime (e.g. burglary while possessing drugs, etc.).”

According to data on SPD’s arrest dashboard, arrests (which include charge-by-officer, a process in which cases are sent directly to the city attorney’s office) for violations of the law peaked in December at 86, and declined to 20 in March. 

When asked if SPD and the city had decreased their emphasis on drug possession and public use in the past several months, Jamie Housen, a spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, said, “There has been no change in police practices around this ordinance.”

The director of King County’’s Department of Public Defense, Anita Khandelwal, says arresting people who are struggling with substance use disorder or who take drugs is never a good use of resources. “There’s no evidence that suggests that doing this is going to make people use drugs less or address the root causes that lead them to be out in public with drugs,” Khandelwal said. 

In 2023, there were 1,338 overdose deaths in King County, the highest number on record. The surge is due largely to fentanyl, a potent and inexpensive opioid. This year, according to data from Public Health – Seattle & King County, there have been at least 302 overdose deaths, including 236 that involved fentanyl. 

In early March, King County announced efforts to address the crisis, including a new residential treatment center, a 24/7 hotline for prescriptions of buprenorphine (a medicine for treating opioid substance use disorder), new mobile treatment teams, and expansion of efforts to distribute naloxone (an overdose reversal medication) and offer anonymous drug testing services.

For its part, the city has created a pilot overdose response unit in the Seattle Fire Department, and in March announced a program that allows paramedics to administer buprenorphine in the field. Last year, the city invested $7 million toward post-overdose care facilities and health hubs. 

“Mayor Harrell’s priority is a dual public health and public safety approach to the fentanyl epidemic, helping users access treatment and services while holding dealers, traffickers, and those causing the most harm accountable,” Housen said.

At a press conference in early March announcing King County’s new efforts, Brad Finegood, who leads the public health department’s overdose prevention programs, noted that the county is hoping to expand anonymous drug testing to help drug users determine if what they’re taking contains fentanyl, “so people can see what’s in their drug samples” Finegood said.

 “It also gives us an opportunity to stay on top of what is coming into our community so that we can be nimble and adapt.”

The county program, which operates out of Public Health’s downtown needle exchange, allows users to drop off small samples of a drug, which are analyzed to determine the contents. It’s part of a statewide system run in part by the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug, and Alcohol Institute (ADAI). Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at UW who directs ADAI’s Center for Community-Engaged Drug Education, Epidemiology & Research, says the city’s new drug use law has made people more reluctant to use the anonymous service. A provision in the state’s 2023 drug law protects people who use the program from prosecution, Banta-Green noted.

“What we are seeing is that while many harm reduction clients are interested in the drug checking process and getting results, most are still quite wary that it is legally safe for them to participate,” Banta-Green said.

 

At the intersection of 12th and Jackson, which has long been a center of activity for selling and using illegal drugs, a pair of SPD patrol vehicles can often be found parked behind a fence in a parking lot shared by several local businesses.

In early April, PubliCola spoke with an officer parked there, who looked bored and was browsing the internet. He said that drug activity had declined in the immediate area.

And to some extent, this is true: Activity at the intersection has visibly declined.

But just a block south, on 12th and King Street, drug use and selling are as active as before. The officer (who declined to share his name) acknowledged this was the case, noting that the situation was like “pushing on a balloon–you squeeze in one place and it pops up somewhere else.” The officer said he hasn’t personally arrested anyone under the new drug use law.

One man hanging out on 12th who shared his first name, Mohammed, has lived in a nearby homeless encampment for four years. He said he’s seen numerous friends overdose and claims that the wait for first responders and the police officers that accompany them has sometimes been too late. “Somebody ODs and nobody is doing nothing, or they’re waiting for the police to show up,” he said. “There’s no care out here, it’s everybody for themselves.”  

Trisha, a woman who also said she’s homeless and sometimes uses drugs, said she thinks that SPD efforts at enforcement aren’t changing much in the neighborhood.  “A lot of us want to change, but don’t have the tools,” she said. “They sweep us and then we’re supposed to change?”

“If we got a roof over our heads, it would help.” she said. “We’re homeless, not hopeless.”